Puppygate

The 2015 Hugo nominations caused widespread gloom and outrage. There'd
been dark forebodings about a shortlist hijacked by politics –
gloating hints on Facebook – and a news embargo broken by the
unexpected tweet "Guess Who's A Hugo Nominee?"

Last year's Hugos suffered a bloc-vote campaign from conservative US
authors claiming discrimination against their favourite military
action-adventures. This made them sad; their "Sad Puppies"
(SP) slate promoted their own and their buddies' work, boosting some
titles onto the Hugo shortlist though not to final victory. Worldcon
voters chose otherwise.

The next SP campaign realized the best strategy was to allow
those pesky final-ballot voters no choice. There's a huge spread of
nominations for each category, with thousands of Worldcon members'
preferences scattered across hundreds of possibles competing for just
five slots on the Hugo ballot. The SPs concocted a complete slate of
five nominees for (almost) all Hugo categories, and instructed their
supporters to vote the straight ticket chosen by the Central Council.

It worked. Using these morally dodgy but legally permissible
tactics, a modest percentage of the electorate can indeed dominate the
ballot. As first announced, slate choices completely filled both Editor
categories, Related Work (nonfiction), Short Story, Novelette and
Novella, with only two non-slate finalists for Best Novel. One novelette
was later ruled ineligible.

More complications! SP associate Vox Day had created a variant "Rabid
Puppies" slate which additionally, shamelessly, pushed himself and
stories from his own small press Castalia House. Despite VD's publicly
expressed racism, misogyny, neo-Nazi sympathies and general
obnoxiousness, RP was even more successful than SP, with seven Castalia
stories on the 2015 Hugo ballot. Not bad for a hitherto unknown
publisher. Apparently VD has many supporters in games fandom who bought
Worldcon memberships and nominated as instructed. Just why is a mystery.

Morally dubious, I wrote, but the SP/RPs say it has to be OK since "obviously"
leftist "Social Justice Warriors" must have done this for
years to deny past Hugos to Puppy-loved candidates. George R.R. Martin,
who's watched the SF awards scene since the 1970s, paused work on his
latest Game of Thrones novel for several long patient posts at
grrm.livejournal.com, explaining that they'd got it wrong and there's no
secret Hugo-controlling cabal (though the Scientologists tried once).
Alas, he used logic. The Puppy response was that GRRM is sadly deluded.

Yes, the Hugo voters' vagaries have created past embarrassments, but
it was painful to see so much lacklustre fiction – some very poor
– railroaded onto the 2015 ballot by slate-voting tactics. Also
depressing is having the Hugos dragged into US culture wars: Puppies
claim in public that they're simply promoting exciting adventure fiction
with no horrid political subtext, while gloating on blogs that this will
make those pinko liberals' heads explode, har har. They love Robert
Heinlein but forgot the recent major Heinlein biography in their
nonfiction slate – so that was crowded out too. One Puppy
nonfiction choice is all political message and no SF, but the right
kind of politics.

Some people found themselves on the slate without their knowledge, or
without realizing this wasn't a friendly recommendations list but an
ideological battle plan. At least one refused nomination before the
shortlist was announced, and (unprecedentedly) three more afterwards
– one too late for the ballot to be changed. Meanwhile Vox Day,
sounding increasingly like a B-movie villain with a volcano lair, warns
that if he is thwarted he will destroy the Hugos forever.

What could thwart rabid puppydom? Every Hugo ballot category has one
choice that no nomination slate can change. In the most rigged
categories, many sad non-puppies plan to vote No Award.